The energy efficient use of wood in a home or business fireplace embraces a great variety of problems. One of the problems encountered by a home owner or other operator of a fireplace is that of energy efficiency in storing and retrieving the wood fuel. First, the wood has to be stored outside of the home in a position so as to protect the wood from the elements. Second, the wood must then be transported manually from this position outside the home to a position near the fire to enable the subsequent fueling of the fire. Third, the manual transfer of the wood from the outside to inside requires the opening and closing of an entry and exit doorway for every arm-load of wood. Since heat escapes when a door is opened, requiring the operator of the fireplace to manually transport the wood through a doorway results in a considerable amount of energy loss and inconvenience. The inconvenience is a direct consequence of the continued exposure of the operator to the climatic conditions existing outside of the home, which at a minimum can involve continued re-adaptation to varying temperature levels, as well as the time involved in manually transfering the wood.
No known wood storage devices are capable of solving the problem of storing readily accessible fire wood for subsequent use in a fireplace located in the interior of a building. All known devices entail the manual transportation of the wood through a door in the house by the operator. Prior systems cannot energy efficiently store the wood and allow for the ready retrieval of the wood, all without the operator's exit from the house for the purpose of retrieving the wood, because they lack several features. First, the system should be capable of storing a large amount of wood so as to allow the operator to fuel a fire for a sufficiently long period of time. Second, the system should keep the wood free from moisture that would tend to inhibit the drying or combustion of the wood. Third, the system should be accessible from the interior of the house for retrieving the wood and accessible from the outside for storing the wood therein. Fourth, the system should be easily operable so as to enable an ordinary person to retrieve the wood. Fifth, the system should be sealed and insulated so as to reduce the heat loss through the system itself when not in operation.
Previously there have been provided cabinets capable of allowing the deposit of goods and the subsequent retrieval by means of an alternate door. U.S. Pat. No. 4,245,776 discloses a pass-through drawer assembly with cam attached doors for the primary use in banking and food applications. For example, an operator inside a structure could lower an item into the drawer through an opening in an inner housing and then cause the drawer to travel through a wall for unloading by a customer. U.S. Pat. No. 1,469,359 discloses a free standing cabinet that sits in a doorway allowing deposit of goods by vendors while a homemaker is away, and subsequent retrieval by the homemaker. The present invention improves upon these concepts by providing an energy efficient means for storing large quantities of wood outside an enclosed space with the ability to allow for the transfer of the wood into the enclosed space by an operator standing inside the enclosed space.